April, in Two Centuries

I’m sitting in my living room. The lamp is on, my laptop is open, and my daughter is on the couch beside me watching something I’ve lost the thread of. My wife is sitting in the chair next to us on her phone, occasionally sharing something with her daughter. The dog is, for a few minutes anyway, not barking at us to give her a treat. It is, by any ordinary measure, a domestic scene, and I am right in the middle of it and also not in there at all, because I am living in 1793.

Her name was Jane Bessom, and she married a man named Francis Freeto, and she came from a family that had emigrated from Jersey in the Channel Islands and brought a language with them (Jèrriais, a Norman French dialect) that Jane’s generation was losing. In the story I’m drafting on the couch, she keeps her house’s accounts in her husband’s absence, and she’s thinking about the letter she would write him but won’t, and about her uncle’s words in a language she understands but doesn’t quite speak.

I am not related to Jane Bessom by blood (though I also might be; the genealogy of Marblehead, Massachusetts, in the late 18th century is tangled enough that everyone might be related to everyone else). What I know is that I’ve spent hours with her this month, and I’ll tell you: she feels like family.

This was April for me. My wife and daughter, in their generosity, have tolerated it.

Inspired by a request from my sister-in-law, I am writing a Semiquincentennial Project: 251 short stories, roughly one page each, one per year from 1776 to 2026, each one following an ancestor, or someone who married into my family tree, or whose story my family tree brushed up against.

It’s a project I launched in mid-April when my sis-in-law texted the idea to me, and I took it on as a kind of dare to myself. I set a self-imposed goal of finishing it on the 4th of July. The math works out to three stories a day, and it takes somewhere between three and five hours of focused work. Those hours are coming on the weekends and in the evenings: after work, after dinner, after a nightly walk with my wife and the dog (which has quietly become one of the better habits I’ve built in years). I open the laptop in the living room, and I enter the 18th and 19th centuries.

The strange part isn’t the pace, or the research, or the writing itself. The strange part is the quality of feeling that comes with it. I found myself genuinely caught off guard when I discovered that one of my lines might connect to a signer of the Mayflower compact. The next morning, as I stood in the shower and my kiddo was at the sink brushing her teeth, I told her about it, “Hey, we might be descended from the Mayflower,” and she said “huh.” A little while later, while gathering my things in the kitchen to get ready for work, I told my wife, and she said, “huh.” They both said it with the generosity of a person who loves you but does not quite share your excitement.

I understand this completely. I would have the same response to my wife recounting a highlight from the softball game she and my kiddo are watching on YouTube.

The people I spent the most focused time with this month are dead. Not metaphorically dead, not symbolically dead — dead dead, two hundred years dead most of them, and gone from any living memory long before that. I have chosen, consciously, to go looking for them, and to sit with them in invented rooms, and to write their last moments, their ordinary moments, the moments when the whole weight of an American moment pressed down on one ordinary life and they had to decide what to do next without knowing what was coming.

I’ve watched a young man see his father get washed overboard in a storm and not be able to do anything about it.

I’ve spent a full January morning walking the fenceline with a middle-aged man who will take his own life later that afternoon.

I’ve celebrated the moment when a young man finishes walking from the coast of Massachusetts to the heart of Vermont and plants his walking stick in the ground, only to have, eighty years later, people still be able to point at the willow tree in the field and tell you exactly where it came from and who put it there.

I’ve inhabited a mother as month after month goes by and she has to tell her small children that, no, their father’s boat hasn’t returned yet, and then, yes, the boat has returned…but just the boat.

None of this is happening. All of this is happening.

My wife and daughter, meanwhile, have softball. My daughter pitches, and pitches well; she actually throws too hard for me to comfortably catch for her, which is either a parenting failure or a compliment to my kiddo, depending on your frame. My wife played and coached in years past, and now she sits at the fence and cheers and coaches under her breath to me, and she comes home from the field with bruises all up her shins and a light in her eyes.

They have their world, and I have mine, and all three of us were in the same room most evenings in April, each of us elsewhere.

I’ve been calling this “beside each other” rather than “with each other,” and it’s accurate, and it is not a complaint.

Connection doesn’t always require presence in the narrow sense: the shared attention, the synchronized experience. It can live in proximity, in tolerance, in the choice to occupy the same space while each person goes somewhere else entirely. My wife lets me disappear into the 1800s. I watch my daughter pitch her opening day game with the specifically sweet joy of a parent watching a child disappear into something she loves and does well. These are different kinds of “beside each other,” and they’re not less real.

One thing from April I keep coming back to: driving through the Adirondacks with the windows down, the air coming in cold and then not cold at all. I was listening to music I’ve been listening to for thirty years. I was not in the 18th century. I was exactly where I was.

Jane Bessom wouldn’t have known April weather like this in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1793. It was the tail end of the Little Ice Age, and the temperatures were still be below freezing for much of the month.

I don’t know if that thought should comfort or concern me.

I suspect both.